Sacha Guitry once said, "You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty." Oh yes, I'm the great pretender.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Deep Throat

Friday around 3am (eek! The hour of mischief for the Devil!) I woke up with severe chills and a very high temperature. After 39 years in this earth, I’ve come to know my body very well, and although I’m no doctor I often can immediately tell the general area where the cause of illness is coming from. It’s my throat, there’s something wrong with my throat. Yesterday it was already acting funny, like a bad cold brewing underneath. Now it’s very painful to swallow. But why the high fever? I went back to sleep, shivering.

By 9am I called in sick, drank paracetamol and lots of fluids (my mom insisted on serving me Tang mixed with kalamansi or Tang mixed with honey), gargled using a salt solution, ate lugaw only and stayed in bed the whole day. Luckily, I had the six books of “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” series by Alexander McCall Smith to keep me company (I plowed through all of them in two-and-a-half days).

By four in the afternoon nothing had changed so I knew stronger juju was in order. We went to our neighborhood clinic. That’s the same clinic we brought my dad when he had his heart attack. The nurse, seeing that I was weak and chilly, told me to lie down on the hospital bed while waiting for the doctor. It was the same bed where my dad was pronounced DOA. Uh-oh. Happily the doctor came, looked down my throat, wrote a prescription and sent me home. It was bacterial pharyngitis.

My sister and brother noted that of all of us siblings, I’m the one who rarely gets sick. Or if I did, I’d be the last one to get hit. Also, I recover pretty fast. On Friday afternoon my doctor gave me enough antibiotics for five days. Saturday morning my fever was gone. By the end of Saturday I was already raring to go out of the house.

Now swallowing is a cinch. But memo to me: spit instead. Then gargle with a powerful mouthwash.